For nearly a decade, Meta has been working on a bold project: AR glasses that are stylish enough to pass as regular eyewear, yet powerful enough to one day replace a smartphone. “When we started, we actually thought there was less than a 10 percent chance that we could do it,” admitted Meta AR Devices VP Ming Hua.
However, at this week’s Meta developer conference, the company showed off the Orion: AR glasses prototype that comes closer to this idea than any other device in its class, leading Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to call them “premium glasses most in the world. .”
Meta has spent tens of billions of dollars on its AR hardware projects, and the company is not alone in its pursuit of wearable computing. Google, Apple, Samsung, and others are all working on AR glasses. Snapchat maker Snap unveiled its latest version of AR Spectacles at an event last week.
Snap’s Spectacles, and Meta’s Orion glasses, offer a fascinating look at the future of personal computing—a future that’s only a few years away. However, they also show why it has been such a challenge for tech companies to make AR glasses, and why none of the big companies are ready to turn their prototypes into mass market products yet.
Or as Zuckerberg put it this week: “The technical challenges of making them upside down.”
Go with Meta’s Orion glasses
At first glance, Orion’s Meta glasses look like a regular pair of glasses, albeit oversized, with thicker rims and temples. Once you install them, you can see holograms overlaid on top of your real world view. These include a number of different apps, including Instagram, Facebook Messenger for chats and video calls, a web browser, videos, a retro space shooter, and a 3D Pong game that you can play against someone else wearing the same set of glasses.
More impressive than the apps themselves is the fact that Orion can display up to three next to each other without forcing you to turn your head. That’s because Orion’s optics feature a 70-degree field of view, much wider than any other augmented reality glasses currently on the market. Snap’s new AR Spectacles, for example, only have a 47-degree field of view, forcing users to frequently turn their heads when looking at AR objects.
“The field of view is changing,” agrees Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Anshel Sag. “It addresses one of the biggest problems in AR.”
Orion’s Meta glasses use eye tracking to help users navigate menus, and come with a futuristic wrist-worn controller that looks a bit like a fitness tracker. The wristband measures electrical currents to pinpoint nerve signals to and from the brain, making it possible to track subtle finger movements that can be used to navigate Orion’s on-screen menus.
“This allows you to make very few touches,” explains Meta’s senior director of product management Rahul Prasad. “You don’t have to raise your hand in place when you look in the mirror, you can put your hand down by your side.”
Meta also integrated hand tracking into the glasses, added an outward-facing camera to allow AI to see real-world objects, optimized silicon carbide optics lenses, and custom-designed chips to reduce power consumption and up to three hours of battery life. life.
All of this makes for a very impressive piece of technology, admits Sag, who has tried a number of different AR and VR devices over the years. He says: “I have never seen glasses with such skill. “It’s very advanced in almost every way.”
AR glasses are here—but you can’t buy them yet
However, combining all that advanced technology also comes with significant downsides. At this point, the Orion would be too expensive, and too difficult to produce, to achieve mass market scale. The company only produced a small number of Orion glasses to be given primarily to company executives and employees. “We will be distributing internally,” Prasad said. “It becomes our time machine to learn what the future looks like.”
Snap isn’t ready to sell its AR glasses to the public yet; The glasses are much larger than Meta’s Orion glasses, and their internal battery lasts 45 minutes per charge. The glasses have a brighter and sharper AR overlay than Meta’s Orion glasses, but their smaller field of view greatly reduces the sense of immersion.
That’s why Snap treats its AR glasses as a developer kit, and makes them available to AR developers willing to pay $2400 for two years of access to the hardware through a subscription program.
Meta, meanwhile, has plans to sell the next version of the Orion to consumers. The company is already testing a high-resolution version of the glasses, and plans to make the glasses, which currently weigh 100 grams, lighter and smaller. But the main goal is affordability. “We want to bring the cost down a lot,” Prasad said, suggesting the device could cost almost as much as a smart phone in the future.
When that tomorrow will come is still unclear. This month’s hardware presentations show that the industry still has a lot of work to do—but they also prove that AR wearables are within reach, as Sag suggests we could see consumer-grade AR glasses within the next three years.
“If you look at chipsets, optics and display technology, things are moving much faster than they were two or three years ago,” Sag said.
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